On Food: Wordsmith delves into the origins of food-related terms

To Anu Garg, there is nothing as delicious as finding the origins of a good word.

Ever wonder why a biscuit is called a biscuit? Garg knows the word comes from the Latin term for "twice-baked," which is how biscuits were made in Roman days.

And that jalapeño chile? It's named after Xalapa, a city in Mexico.

The term "gourmand" loses some of its classy overtones after learning it came from the Old French gormant, or glutton. And what makes a halibut a halibut, according to Garg, is that the fish once was eaten on holy days, with the name derived from the Middle English words hali (holy) and butte (flatfish).

Garg, a Woodinville resident, has gained worldwide fame as the Wordsmith (wordsmith.org), writing a scholarly but often droll daily e-mail since 1994 in which he discusses a word and its origins. He has more than 600,000 subscribers in places as far-flung as Azerbaijan and Bhutan.

In his latest book collecting the origins of words, "The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two" (Plume, $13), Garg devotes a chapter to food alone, chewing over the etymology of culinary terms with noteworthy backgrounds. (The avocado of the book's title, he wrote, "originated in the Aztec language Nahuatl, where it was called ahuacatl, meaning 'testicle' because of its shape.")

Food is so integral to our lives and cultures, Garg said last week before an appearance at the Ballard Library, it's no surprise that related words are steeped so deeply into our language.

"Language is a reflection of people," he said, and food terms seep deeply even into metaphors, such as a "juicy" plot.

And just as careful eaters read labels to find what's hidden in their meals, Garg delves into food words for "what's hiding in their etymologies."

One of his surprising finds: Many common food-related words are borrowed from other languages, but "naturalized" so we'd never suspect their origins. Candy, for instance, is from khand, the Sanskrit word for piece.

Garg was born in India and began learning English in sixth grade. No one, he said, would have expected his life to revolve around English words. A programmer and former Internet consultant -- his résumé includes AT&T Labs and MCI -- he earned a master's degree in computer science from Case Western Reserve, where he began A.Word.A.Day as a graduate student. He now works full time on books, speaking tours and the service, which The New York Times once called "arguably the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace."

A.Word.A.Day features a weekly theme, and food has been a recurring favorite. Garg said his research sometimes hits immediate pay dirt -- when, say, the Oxford English Dictionary shows a clear path to a word's origins. But "etymology is not an exact science" he said, and a word's history often is murkier.

Of course, he knew the O.E.D. selected a food word -- "locavore," meaning one who strives to eat foods grown or produced locally -- as its 2007 word of the year.

"I like that word," he said, smiling. "I like the sound of it."

Garg is an equal-opportunity wordsmith: Though a vegan himself, he gladly hunts down words such as "carnivore" or does weekly features such as last year's on "porcine words" to mark the Chinese Year of the Pig.

He was raised a vegetarian but stopped eating all animal products 13 years ago, after giving the issue serious thought.

"What really struck me was that animals are also sentient beings ...," he said. "I realized that they are made for their own purposes -- whether you believe in God or nature -- not for us to consume."

His mother, he said, was horrified when he told her he was switching to the stricter vegan diet. "She says, 'Anu, how are you going to survive without milk?' he said. He reminded her that people have the same reactions when one-time carnivores announce they will stop eating meat.

For his actual -- not literary -- culinary pleasures, Garg favors the cooking of his wife, Stuti, and enjoys Indian and Thai and pizza. He's never known anyone, he said, who didn't like pizza.